Sunday, December 7, 2008

Chronicles Of Depression 2.0: #463: The Ws

People don't seem to understand, or maybe they just don't want to understand, or maybe the talking heads are trying to keep them from understanding, how bad this is, this crisis, this financial crisis, this “slowdown”, this “contraction”.

Let me help. The U.S. is broke. States and municipalities are in debt up to their eyeballs. Trillions of “dollars” are being spent by government agents in a desperate attempt to hold back the flood of bankruptcies and liquidations -- bankruptcies and liquidations that MUST eventually occur -- for another month or two. The international banking system teeters on the brink of implosion. In the eyes of Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke, everyone has become too big to fail, because these guys know that failure of one could mean a collapse of all. The entire human web of interdependence -- not simply in the financial realm of Collateralized Debt Obligations and Mortgage Backed Securities and Credit Default Swaps and Futures and Options and Bonds and the like, but of tangible infrastructure, like food and water and power and fuel and all of things we need to survive -- it is all hanging together by a thread. And in some parts of the world the thread has already frayed away to nothing, exposing people to the real-life horrors of collapse.

Emphasis added by me.

This is a post many of you will note in passing right now and then come back to later in panic. He goes over the Ws:

WHEAT, WATER, WATTS, WASTE, WELLNESS and WORK.

You'll be repeating those to others at some point in 2009.

Or having people on TV reciting them to your face.

That's if you still have electricity.

For those of you who mocked my term "micro-terrorism," especially note this:

Terrorists in countries such as Colombia frequently attack the power-grid infrastructure, often leaving homes and businesses without power for weeks at a time. The power-grid infrastructure in the United States is virtually unprotected and remains an exceptionally soft target for both domestic and foreign-based terrorists.